Troublesome Misnomers
- Admin
- Jul 23, 2022
- 8 min read
Updated: Sep 19, 2022
Language is important. Even more so when communicating science, and rational conversation. It’s equally important to know how to spot the potentially deceptive use of language.
Here are some misnomers commonly adopted by anti-scientific agendas, to disguise bad ideas as having a sense of legitimacy, giving them false balance, and distorting the truth – often to sell something. The way they are frequently used is intellectually dishonest and in bad faith, specifically when adopted by pseudo-intellectuals to present an ideology or denialism as a counter argument to a well established truth, the truth of which is supported with evidence while the ‘counter’ argument is not.
When you scrutinise these misnomers, they don’t offer any real value, any logical substance, and don’t offer any clarity to views which would oppose well-established scientific concepts. If you are careful enough to parse them, they often disprove themselves. The trick is using them in such a convoluted manner that the consumer is deceived into thinking they hold water.
‘Religious/Mythical/Personal Truth’
A tenuous term for a belief, moral judgement, opinion, subjective experience or even another metaphor. Charitably used when politely characterising religious or personal beliefs. Why not just say belief? It blurs the line between the objective truth and religiously based notions of truth which usually constitute metaphors for life lessons. If it is true to life, aka useful or meaningful, then it’s a truth whether through a religious lens or not. Consider the definition of truth:
“The property (as of a statement) of being in accord with fact or reality”
It’s a peeve of mine that scientific thinkers and reasonable people use terms like ‘scientific truths’ and different ‘truths’ such as religious, cultural, political, or mythological ‘truths’ when describing something for which there is a lack of or no evidence to support.
The term is part of a meta-language, where simple human moral constructs which are easy to communicate and understand such as ‘treat others how you wish to be treated’, are described in a convoluted and cryptic way; layered in word salad metaphors presented as wordy stories and parables, sometimes left open to interpretation. Therein lies the deceptive capability of such language.
Truth, facts, or reality are true whoever is looking at it, whether they want to acknowledge it, or whether or not they perceive it. Even if someone believes something which is true objectively to be false or a lie, it is still true. The use of such terms opens the gate for (some) people to create their own version of reality and call it objective, or ‘true’. It is actually their perception of reality, built on many things like subjectivity, confirmation bias, or the desire for something to be true. This can cross over into objective reality and ludicrous consequences can emerge (see abortion in the USA). Just because everyone has their own perception of reality, doesn’t mean there isn’t an objective, shared reality. Hence the tools of science.
There are other words for ‘religious' or 'mythical' 'truth’ which would apply more soundly – belief, story, parable, opinion, moral stance, cultural tradition, ethical perspective, etc. It depends on the context. These (and more) are sufficient to describe a view without objectifying it, and are free from hidden connotations that the term ‘religious truth’ might carry. See also ‘political truth’ or ‘metaphorical truth’. These terms don’t need the word ‘truth’ after them.
‘Alternative Medicine’
Also ‘alternative treatments’, ‘alternative therapies’, and words wrongly used within them such as ‘remedies’. If a medicine works, it is medicine. If a remedy is indeed a remedy, in that it is proven physically to work, it is medicine. The ‘alternative’ is not medicine, not a remedy. It simply doesn’t make sense, until you understand it is an undercover term for pseudoscience.
This catch-all phrase when spelled out, effectively means unproven/disproven/unregulated medicine, or ‘patent’ medicine – made by the very person selling it to you. Alternative medicine is very prevalent in modern culture – a multi-billion dollar industry in America alone. The term includes the word ‘medicine’, but in fact none of the modalities under this umbrella term are recognised as medicine by expertise-based, regulatory or scientific institutions, because they are proven not to work, and therefore they are either self-regulated (red flags, conflict of interest, fox guarding the hen house) or sold under the much less strict herbs and supplements regulations in the case of consumables. Worse still, you will see hundreds of influencers on YouTube, Tik-Tok and Instagram peddling even more bizarre and dangerous ideas and calling them science-based.
Many logical fallacies are found within alternative medicine, perhaps most commonly the naturalistic fallacy or appeal to nature, and more insidiously the appeal to emotion. Also very commonly, the appeal to popularity (argumentum ad populum) with anecdotes and testimonials taken as evidence or 'proof'. This, because they cannot appeal to evidence which does not exist. This learning resource by Thinking Is Power is a fantastic overview of the most common traits and techniques of pseudoscience sales techniques.
Alternative Medicine often comes hand in hand with conspiratorial motives, distrust in the government and big pharma (huge irony), and magical and untestable beliefs. Clever salesmen or merely misled victims of poor ‘scientific’ studies, unaware of the true consensus of expert opinion, capitalise on and profit from these above beliefs.
Other telltale words or terms in Alternative medicine include TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine), nostrums, elixirs, integrative medicine, holistic, etc. All are meaningless in determining it’s use as a treatment, or as having any effect at all. Most are indicative of a money making scheme, and are used to sell unproven treatments, which is why it is painfully ironic that they tend to distrust big pharma. To quote Tim Minchin:
“You know what they call alternative medicine that’s proven to work? Medicine.”
‘Vaccine Skeptic’
See also ‘Covid sceptic’, ‘climate change skeptic’ or ‘[insert established science here] sceptic’.
I’ve seen this one pop up in several news sources when giving false balance to non-expert opinions. Skepticism (namely scientific skepticism) and being skeptical is having justified reservations based proportionally on the available evidence (or lack of) for a claim.
Being a ‘vaccine skeptic’ (when discussing established, safe vaccines) is a bastardisation of the word skeptic by those who don’t understand enough about the science or have an agenda to oppose them for illegitimate reasons. Equally, they don't acknowledge how much they don't know. If you call yourself a skeptic of an extremely well-established science supported with data, and you don’t have any equally strong or disconfirming evidence, then you are not skeptical; you are ignorant, in need of education.
Having unsubstantiated doubts about a complex topic you don’t understand, merely to oppose it (for whatever reason), is not skepticism – it is motivated reasoning and denialism. If there is no claim being made then it may be simply motivated by fear, but is still unsubstantiated, nonetheless. This applies not just to vaccines, but any other topic.
This snippet below (1.09.34 - 1.14.04) discusses the word skeptic, and fake skepticism, in more nuance.
‘COVID Sceptic’
Here is a real example of the above – I just caught The Guardian news using the term ‘Covid sceptic’ to describe:
“Joanne Allman, a vocal Covid sceptic who last year stood as a local election candidate in Sefton, Merseyside, for the Freedom Alliance, a “campaigning political party” born out of the pandemic to “resist attacks on medical freedom and body autonomy”.
On social media, she dismissed Omicron:
“moronic variant scariant BULLSHIT”
Re-shared a post on Twitter calling the vaccine rollout a:
“reckless, dangerous, insane experiment”.
In other posts she said PCR testing was:
“fraud underlying the greatest hoax in medical history”
Tweeted that people:
“the world over” were being “coerced into having an experimental vaccine”
Alongside a picture of the Nuremberg trials, held after the second world war to bring Nazi war criminals to justice, she wrote:
“How long will we have to wait before those … who are complicit in tyranny are brought to justice for crimes against humanity?”
Yeah…comparing an optional, modern medical privilege to the holocaust. Sadly, I’ve heard that one before. It is intellectually lazy, disrespectful and highly ignorant to draw such comparisons.
This is not a ‘skeptic’. This is blatant denialism. Baseless fearmongering, as put by credible skeptic and notable campaigner against pseudoscience and disinformation, Michael Marshall, of the Good Thinking Society. Conspiracies, anti-science quackery, and contrarianism/denialism are completely different from skepticism, and should not be afforded the false equivalence of being labelled ‘skeptical’.
This veil of fake skepticism can allow people with nefarious intent or opinions, such as Joanne Allman, to get away with covertly integrating anti-vax groups with legitimate-sounding charities such as Thinking Autism, which was lately found to be:
“…promoting unproven autism treatments in testimonials on its website and directed families to webinars by clinicians linked to the disgraced former doctor Andrew Wakefield.”
She says:
“My personal opinions on Covid-related issues have no bearing on my role as a director and trustee of Thinking Autism,”
But this is deceptive and worrying. By having anti-vax and conspiratorial tendencies, she is directly linked with the nonsense of disgraced former doctor Andrew Wakefield (see article), who became rich by creating the myth and fraudulent claims that Autism was linked to childhood vaccinations. Is it really much of a jump from spreading COVID vaccine nonsense to the notion that other vaccines cause Autism for someone like Joanne Allman? If you support a charity where such misinformed and dangerous opinions are held by people with power, you wouldn’t want to take that chance.
Such is the danger in using incorrect terms for people who are deceptive and will twist the language any way they can, to appear more reasonable or get away with lies. Journalism needs not to legitimise flawed arguments and opinions by watering down the language with such misnomers.
‘The Placebo Effect’
Finally, and perhaps the most difficult to understand why this is a misnomer, is the placebo effect. Not a ‘placebo’ – this is not a misnomer. Specifically, ‘the placebo effect’.
This is still often mischaracterised by science communicators, and more commonly journalists. You see, the placebo ‘effect’ is not real, not a stand-alone thing. There are a wide range of components which make up what is perceived as this ‘effect’, but they are not an outcome of an effective intervention. Rather, they are baseline variables, useful to measure real outcomes of an intervention against.
Placebos have a specific use in clinical trials. They control for human biases and ever-changing variables of the body. These variables include but are not limited to confirmation bias (thinking you feel differently because of the intervention, even if you would have felt differently anyway), expectancy bias (reduced perception of pain due to the expectancy of an intervention, for example), reduced stress through feeling we are being taken care of, regression to the mean (natural course of the illness improving), subjective reporting and measurement of pain (not quantifiable or verifiable) and many more.
If a treatment has a measurable effect above and beyond these accounted variables, it can be said to have an effect. The misperception is that if a treatment performs ‘as well’ as a placebo, it must work because the placebo effect itself 'is powerful', ‘does something’ or is the 'power of the mind' healing the body. This is incorrect. This notion is precisely the cognitive bias the trial looks to control for.
Placebos are simply a way to eliminate the ‘background noise’ from a trial so that you can see accurately if a treatment does not have an effect. If the intervention performs no better than placebo (or 'as well as' a placebo) – it does not work. It would be perhaps more accurately named the ‘placebo bias’, or the ‘placebo test’.
Conclusively, the ‘effect’ part of the placebo effect is the expected biases and variables involved in the testing of an intervention at base level (when you do nothing), which are identified and controlled for, to attain more accurate data.
To finish, the below podcast is a further dive on the misuse of the term 'placebo effect' (13.32 - 40.22) explaining in depth why it isn't an 'effect' in itself using a real life example of a poor scientific study, which had been misinterpreted by the hosts of a different podcast. They mistake the results of classical conditioning with the placebo effect being real:
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